In the days following Sept. 11, 2001, nervous Hollywood executives flew into a frenzy, pushing back release dates, deleting scenes of the World Trade Center and generally assuming people would rather not be reminded of 9/11.

Those were business decisions: Upsetting patrons generally isn't high on Hollywood's to-do list. Inevitably, however, filmmakers, like artists in other fields, could not ignore the worst terror attack ever to take place on American soil, and they're betting that an audience hungry for reality-tinged entertainment doesn't want to avert its gaze for long.

Mostly, the terror attacks have been treated tangentially or even allegorically, but now, for the first time, 9/11 is taking center stage in a number of movies and television programs under development.

Two major studio releases dealing with the World Trade Center attack are in production, and ABC is developing a 9/11 miniseries. Another indication of a change in the pop cultural climate is the stunning swiftness with which the war in Iraq was transformed into a television series. Over There, a Steven Bochco series on the FX cable channel, debuted July 27.

"It's a whole new ball game," said Robert J. Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, who noted that film and especially television traditionally have been slow to deal with such tumultuous events.

These upcoming projects — which put viewers at Ground Zero during the attacks or in the middle of an ongoing, politically charged war — will test the extent to which the public wants to be immersed and also whether such emotional and politically divisive topics are suitable for mass entertainment.

"In the 1960s and 1970s, television ignored everything that was going on in the real world," says Thompson, who is director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television. "We had the civil rights movement raging in the South, and the Andy Griffith Show was the top show on television. Then we had the war in Vietnam and Gomer Pyle USMC, about a marine for heaven's sake, was the big show."

TV shows about Vietnam didn't appear until more than a decade after the conflict was over and The Deer Hunter, the first major film treatment of the war, was released in 1978, five years after the United States' withdrawal. In contrast, Thompson says, "references to 9/11 have been pretty much constant."

It infuses the plot of the popular Fox program 24. On the FX show Rescue Me, New York firefighters deal with the emotional fallout of the World Trade Center attacks. And the creator of Lost, an ABC series about plane crash survivors, acknowledges 9/11's influence.

The attacks were such traumatic events that it is inevitable they'd cast a long shadow over American life and culture even though early Hollywood reaction and dire pronouncements about the death of irony turned out to be off base.

Country music responded quickly with a spate of patriotic songs. Television program such as West Wing and Third Watch swiftly incorporated 9/11 into their plots. And there have been a number of books, both fiction and nonfiction, that deal with the disaster.

Until now, though, the movies that dealt most powerfully with 9/11 hid their messages behind allegory. M. Night Shyamalan's The Village disappointed some moviegoers because it wasn't the horror film they expected; it was instead a fable about the ways fear can be used and abused by leaders.

And on the surface War of the Worlds was a summer popcorn flick, albeit one with echoes of 9/11. But the chief screenwriter says he consciously undated the anti-colonialism message of H.G. Welles' 19th century novel. The aliens represent American forces invading Iraq. The film even has an attempted suicide bombing.

"I view it as an antiwar film, especially an anti-Iraq War film," David Koepp told the Los Angeles Times. "You don't foreground it (the politics) because it ruins the movie. If someone wants to see it, great. If they don't, they can just watch the movie and be happy."

One of the first feature films to deal with 9/11 was Spike Lee's little-seen but much-praised 25th Hour, which starred Edward Norton as a New York drug dealer about to begin a long prison sentence.

Craig Brewer, who wrote and directed Hustle & Flow, called it "one of the best American movies of the past decade. The way it dealt with the loss of freedom and the mood of sorrow that happened after 9/11, and the way all this dribbled down into the narrative — it was great."

Such nuance was lacking in Spider-Man, perhaps the first mainstream movie to reference 9/11. After the attacks, Columbia quickly yanked a trailer that showed a helicopter caught in a giant web spun between the twin towers, and tacked on pandering scenes meant to honor New York.

We also shouldn't expect much in the way of subtlety in the 9/11 movie under development with the highest profile. The as-yet-unnamed film will star Nicolas Cage and be directed by Oliver Stone, whose previous films have included a hotly debated examination of John F. Kennedy's assassination and angry looks at Vietnam and Wall Street.

Paramount Pictures, which will distribute the movie, says the story of the last two men rescued from the collapsed Trade Center will be about "how the human spirit rose above the tragic events of that day," but that sounds like a film by Ron Howard, not the congenitally provocative and contrarian Stone.

Speaking of Howard, he had been attached to an eight-part 9/11 NBC miniseries, but the network killed the project, in part because of competition from ABC.

The ABC series, Stone's film and 102 Minutes, a competing 9/11 rescue movie from Columbia Pictures, so far are without release dates.

The only American movie to deal openly with 9/11 has been Michael Moore's polemical documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which alienated as many people as it galvanized.

In the first episode of Over There, executive producer Steven Bochco worked hard to show that he has no political ax to grind, but as Thompson noted: "Any TV show about an ongoing war is working with politics. (The show) doesn't have a political point of view, but it's like a Rorschach test." It's "filled with politics," he said, but it's up to the viewers to interpret it.

A much-discussed shot in the first episode, for instance, shows the top half of an Iraqi insurgent being vaporized as his legs keep running. It's a powerful image that some will view as a shocking visual argument against war but that others might see as glorification of American firepower.

"Bochco is walking a very fine line," Thompson said, predicting that the show's politics will become less ambiguous in subsequent episodes.

This also seems to be true about Spielberg's post 9/11 work. Surprisingly, he is shaping up as the filmmaker with the most to say in response to the terror attacks. War of the Worlds is the second part of what seems to be a developing trilogy, and it appears each film will be harder edged and more politically pointed than the last.

The Terminal, about a Department of Homeland Security snafu that strands a traveler in New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, was a misconceived love song to America, balm for a nation's troubled soul, that was regarded as one of Spielberg's weaker efforts.

War was crafted so that its message could easily be overlooked or even misread — the aliens could be viewed as either terrorists or American soldiers.

Spielberg's next film, however, will be harder to dismiss or misconstrue. Its plot doesn't involve 9/11, but the director suggested in a statement last month that it will be a meditation on the West's response to terrorism.

Titled Munich and set to be released in December, it is about the secret Israeli squad assigned to assassinate Palestinians who massacred Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

"By experiencing how the implacable resolve of these men to succeed in their mission slowly gave way to troubling doubts about what they were doing," Spielberg said, "I think we can learn something important about the tragic stand-off we find ourselves in today."

Unlike Stone or Lee, Spielberg generally isn't thought of as a politically engaged filmmaker, but the sustained conversation he has launched about life in these times may force a reappraisal.